Cerabino: It’s smear: This lovebug season in Florida is a wipe out

By Frank Cerabino Palm Beach Post

Saturday

May 18, 2019 at 12:01 AM

For some kind words about lovebugs, you can’t do better than Norman Leppla.

Leppla is a professor in the Department of Entomology and Nematology at the University of Florida. He’s also the state’s eminent authority on lovebugs, those swarming black flies that are co-joined tail-to-tail in post-coital bliss the moment before they are smashed to smithereens -- by the billions -- on the windshields and grilles of passing automobiles.

Leppla’s got a soft spot for lovebugs, which have blanketed parts of Florida this month in their annual May swarm.

If you travel on I-95 or Florida’s Turnpike through the middle of the state during the day, the front of your car will be plastered with their black bodies, and your windshield will be dotted with the syrupy remains of their egg pouches, a gluey substance that just gets smeared by your wipers.

They’ve just got an unfortunate habit of congregating over Florida’s well-traveled highways because a major component in the fumes of gas engines smells to them like the odors coming from decaying plants, their preferred egg-laying site.

“When a car hits a lovebug, it separates the eggs from the insect,” Leppla said. “That smear on the windshield is about 350 lovebug eggs.”

So in a single trip, each windshield can collect the remains of hundreds of thousands of lovebug eggs.

The bugs create a cleaning headache for motorists, who should remove them from the car within 24 hours, before the sun bakes them into the paint.

Even still, Leppla prefers to look at the lovebugs as an interesting, and generally benign, member of the insect world.

“Lovebugs sail from flower to flower much like butterflies and in smaller numbers could be perceived as beautiful,” he wrote in his seminal work on the subject, “Living with Lovebugs,” a paper published by the University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences Extension.

“Since lovebug populations tend to rebound unpredictably, we are fortunate that these creatures create inconveniences and tickle, rather than threaten human health and the environment.”

Lovebugs are not native to Florida. They migrated from the Yucatan Peninsula, through Texas and the Gulf states before reaching Florida in the 1940s.

The bugs, which are actually a kind of fly, swarm for about a 10-day period during May, and then a second time during September. Their eggs, which thrive in decaying vegetation in a grassy area with the right level of moisture, cycle through the larva and pupa stages before spending just three or four days as flying adults.

The male lovebugs, which have oversized eyes for spotting females, hover in a swarm. The larger-bodied females fly up into the male swarm. One male lovebug attaches end-to-end to the unattached female, and then there’s a battle as other males try to replace the attached male on the female.

“In this competition for females, larger males are able to displace the smaller ones about 20 percent of the time, but success diminishes if the original male has been attached for a long time,” Leppla wrote.

(And this is how lovebugs are like people.)

Within 10 minutes, the couple lands on some vegetation and the copulating begins.

After hours of sweet lovebug-making, the pair fly off together, with the smaller male still attached tail to tail and facing backwards.

(Also like people!)

His final task is to find a nectar meal before he dies. Her job is to deposit all those newly inseminated eggs before she dies.

And that’s when the co-joined lovebugs confuse those car fumes for the scent of a good patch of decaying vegetation to bury the eggs.

And then they are pulverized by your fast-moving car, the egg sac explodes, and you’ve got about 24 hours to remove the genocide before it ruins your paint job.

If you’re lucky, a heavy rain will do most of the work for you.

“Put a coat of wax on the car before the season starts, then get them off quickly,” Leppla said.

If you aren’t prepared this time, don’t despair.

You’ll have another chance in September.

Frank Cerabino (fcerabino@pbpost.com) is a columnist for the Palm Beach Post.

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